HAIRTG-CARDS 2

HairTG-Cards 2 provides a complete workflow for the creation of card-based hair/fur models, using procedural and artist friendly solutions covering both the hair material and card geometry generation, integrated with popular tools Substance 3D Painter and Blender.

HairTG-Cards 2 is a massive update to the previous v1 release, bringing a Painter plugin to make texturing even more intuitive and fast, and new Blender components integrating with the Blender hair system to handle UV mapping, generate hair cards from curves and handle regular or procedural hair materials.

You may check our website at eyosido.com and join our Discord for questions, support and discuss with the community.

REQUIREMENTS

• Substance 3D Painter 10.1+ for the texturing tools
• Blender 4.5/5.0 for the modeling tools

The texturing and modeling tools may be used independently.

OVERALL FEATURES

• Procedural & Artist Friendly - HairTG-Cards 2 brings the power of procedural generation tailored to artists needs, choose the right amount of automated generation for your workflow and have full control over the result.
• Fully Dynamic - Both the hair material and cards are generated procedurally, which implies resolution independence, non-destructive workflow and randomization of properties.
• Hair Material Design - A powerful set of hair material features and presets into Painter to make a variety of hair styles, including hundreds of parameters, extensive coloring options and more.
• Hair card geometry from curves - HairTG-Cards leverages the Blender hair curves system to turn them into cards with plenty of options such as dynamic polygon count, card tilt and Auto-Tilt to face the model, UV mapping etc. Compatible with Blender hair tools including Geometry Nodes.
• Global and Local Properties - Both the hair material and card geometry management include global and local properties, enabling to make global changes to the whole card set or local modifications to specific areas and designs.
• Design Presets - HairTG-Cards includes dozens of high quality artist designed hair presets, covering various styles, all editable.
• Dynamic Material - In Blender and supporting hosts, a dynamic version of the hair material lets you experiment with various variations, acting on the waviness, coloring, hair density, combing, thickness and many more. In Painter the hair material may also be fully edited procedurally on the character model.
• Learning Material - Provided with 7+ hours of tutorial videos covering the complete creation of a hair model as well as detailed User Manuals for both the texturing and modeling sides.
• HairTG-Cards Pro - Includes the regular HairTG-Cards content plus specific components for Substance 3D Designer, enabling to create custom hair components

HAIR TEXTURING IN SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER

• Procedural hair/fur texture generation: the HTC-Card Substance provides a complete set of parameters to procedurally generate various hair or fur texture styles, including straight, long, short, wide, stray, wavy, curly hair. Using an intuitive decoupling of hair components such as strands and threads, users may shape their hair style precisely using control points and hundreds of hair attributes.
• Control over multiple designs at once: the HTC-Controller Substance enables to control several HTC-Card Substances at once, so there is no need to repeat common parameters into all the card layers.
• Seamless integration into Painter: the HairTG-Cards Painter plugin includes multiple user interface items  integrated into Painter: Toolbar, Preset Browser, Project Setup, Workshop, Export views etc.
• Hair designs editable on the character model: when using a Painter project with a character model whose hair/fur has been built with the HairTG-Cards tools, its hair textures may still be edited procedurally within Painter while visualized on the model. This helps to experiment with various hair design variations within the same environment.
• Project Setup: the Project Setup Wizard prepares the Texture Set channels for HairTG-Cards and creates startup card layers with a configurable amount of columns and rows. It may also create layers from pre-designed Design Sets so users may start from an already fully populated design set and edit it.
• Design Presets: HairTG-Cards comes with dozens of hair design presets (number depends on the edition) covering a wide range of hair styles. Users may pick one as startup and edit its parameters to create their own. Each preset is a starting point and includes hundreds of variations of similar designs.
• Preset Browser: a complete Preset Browser view dedicated to HairTG-Cards, with filters covering major hair styles, preview thumbnails of various sizes and tag search.
• Design Set Presets: Design Sets contains multiple hair designs ready to use or to edit. Design Sets presets may be used from the Project Setup and users may also create their own.
• Toolbar: the HairTG-Cards toolbar provides many functionalities from a single click : focus/unfocus on a design within a set, previous/next random variation, design generation sizing operations (fit height etc.), design post-transforms, control point selectors etc.
• Rendering Options: Rendering Options enable to select the output maps to generate, one of the two available renderers (Performance and Complete), Rendering Profiles and various options, all gathered into a single view.
• Extensive Coloring Options: hair design coloring may be made in various ways, using blend maps, uniform colors, root and tip tint, addition of grey hair or other variations and color palettes pushing coloring granularity up to the single hair (depending on the HairTG-Card edition).
• Workshop: the Workshop enables to create progressions between designs, to morph some aspects of one design into another along selected parameters. Create a set of designs with decreasing hair density or shorter length with a few clicks. Morphing parameters may also be combined (depending on the edition on HairTG-Cards).
• Painter Transforms Friendly: hair designs may be moved and sized within the texture space using the regular Painter transform tools. In addition, several layers/designs may be transformed at once using the HairTG-Cards toolbar.
• Texture Export: a specific Texture Export view presents all the HairTG-Cards export specific enablers: map selector, resolution, supersampling, file format, bit depth, quality level etc., easing the texture export process (no need to use Painter export) and enabling various HairTG-Cards specific toggles.
• Dynamic Design Set Export: A whole Design Set may be exported and imported into a Design Set Player Substance, able to dynamically update numerous hair designs parameters in Substance supporting hosts such as Blender.
• Layer import/export: the Painter layers containing the HairTG-Card hair designs may be exported (including folders) then imported into another project. Only the layer parameters and descriptors are exported in a text file, so may be imported be into other compatible versions of Painter/HairTG-Cards without transporting binaries.
• Square or Rectangle texture space support: square or rectangle texture spaces are supported and operations within HairTG-Cards operate function of the chosen mode.
• Output Maps: HairTG-Cards is generating the following material maps : Opacity, ID, Height, Basecolor, Normal, Flow, Anisotropy Angle, Anisotropy Level, Roughness, Root, Tip.

HAIR MODELING IN BLENDER

• Integrated into the Blender hair curve system: the HairTG-Cards 2 modeling tools sit on top on the Blender hair curve system, using Geometry Nodes and Modifiers, meaning native or third-party Blender tools used to generate or transform hair may curves be used.
• Procedural hair/fur card generation from hair curves: HairTG-Cards dynamically generates hair card geometry from Blender hair curves. Many hair card components such as length, width, resolution, orientation and more may be updated dynamically in real-time following a non-destructive workflow.
• Dynamic hair material (optional): using the Card Set Player Substance and Substance 3D add-on into Blender, a dynamic hair material may be used and its properties edited within Blender, enabling to change the hair shape, density, coloring options and more.
• Per-area hair card generation: an HairTG-Cards Modifier generating cards from curves is usually applied to a group of curves populating a certain area. It is therefore local to this area and may have specific properties, as well as global ones. The choice of hair designs to use and many other properties are local to the area, enabling to create a hair model from several local specificities. Several Modifiers may be used on the same area to add even more diversity.
• Local and global hair card controls: even though HairTG-Cards Modifiers are local to a group of hair curves, they are also controlled by the HairTG-Cards add-on with global properties. This makes it possible to change the card resolution for all Modifiers at once using the add-on, as well as to share UV coordinates, card width and more.
• UV mapping helper tools: HairTG-Cards makes it easy to create UV coordinates to map hair textures to actual cards. Using a dedicated Modifier and automated calculations in the add-on, what used to be a tedious process may now be made in a few minutes.
• UV mapping sharing between projects: the HairTG-Cards add-on enables to save/restore the UV coordinates used to map a specific hair texture set in order to share them between projects using the same texture set.
• Tilt and Random Tilt per area: hair cards may be tilted (rotated) per area covered by a HairTG-Cards Modifier, in a fixed and random way. Randomness enables to tilt each card a little bit differently from each other so the whole group may be seen optimally from any angle.
• Auto-Tilt, full or partial: this feature enables to tilt cards of an area so they face the head/body of the model. This is especially useful for cards close to the head/body model. Auto-Tilt may also be enabled partially to the root portion of the hair and progressively disabled, leaving the tip portion tilt-free as it is moving away from the model.
• Dynamic Card Resolution: the number of subdivisions of cards along their length and width is dynamic and may be changed at any time, either globally from the add-on, affecting all the cards, or locally per Modifier. Resolution may be set either as a fixed value, or relatively per area. This way cards in the hair model may not all have the same resolution, underneath ones may have a lower resolution and prominent ones a higher resolution, helping to achieve an optimal visual aspect versus polygon count. Using relative resolution, cards use a percentage of the global resolution defined in the add-on, updating the latter updates resolution in all cards while preserving their relative factor.
• Variable Resolution and Auto-Resolution inside cards: HairTG-Cards enables to control the distribution of resolution subdivisions along the length of the hair, so portion of cards being curvy may use more subdivisions than those being straight. This distribution is made either automatically or manually for more precise control. Combined with dynamic and relative card resolution, HairTG-Cards enables to create optimal hair card models with a low polygon count while preserving smooth curves as much as possible.
• Cards or Tubes: not only cards may be generated from hair curves, but also tubes. These may be used for specific hair styles.
• Input curve count control and curve selector: the number of cards to generate from curves is configurable, so only a portion of the input curves may be used to generate cards. This makes it possible to generate hair cards from an external curve-based hair model which may have a lot more curves than needed for cards. This curve selection may be made in two ways, either using a specific Modifier before entering the card generator, or though the hair card generator. 
• Card twisting: hair cards may be twisted along their length for special effects. The twist may also be made partially towards the tip portion of the hair.
  

EDITIONS

HairTG-Cards is available in 3 editions, please visit eyosido.com for details about the differences between editions.

• Personal - The Personal Edition of HairTG-Cards is for non-commercial use and contains the main functionalities of the tools but with several limitations.
• Regular - This is the main distribution of HairTG-Cards, it has all the features except those of the Pro edition.
• Pro - HairTG-Cards Pro includes additional content enabling to create hair components in Substance 3D Designer. The SBS graphs of several components are provided (the core of the hair generators remains in SBSAR form), enabling to customize the Substances used into Painter and Blender, such as the main card material in Painter (HTC-Card), the Controller (HTC-Controller) and the Card Set Players (HTCS-CardSet).

CONTENTS

HairTG-Cards:

• Substances (SBSAR) and a plugin for Substance 3D Painter.
• An Add-On and Geometry Nodes Groups for Blender.
• 2 manuals: Texturing and Modeling.
• Tutorial videos (about 7+ hours in total) covering the entirety of the tools and creation of a full hair model.

HairTG-Cards Pro:

Same content as the regular HairTG-Cards edition plus SBS files for various components except the hair generators which are SBSAR only. Specific tutorial video.

LICENSE NOTICE

Licenses are single seat only. You cannot resell or distribute the package or some of its content into a form that would expose it to reuse. In particular you cannot share Painter projects, Smart Materials containing SBSARs from this package.

LICENCE TYPES

• HairTG-Cards Personal, non-commercial: for personal use (not companies), the product may be used for non-commercial projects only.
• HairTG-Cards Indie, commercial: the tool and generated textures may be used for commercial projects, for individuals, schools or companies with revenue below USD $100K a year.
• HairTG-Cards Pro Studio, commercial: the tool and generated textures may be used for commercial projects, for individuals, schools or companies with revenue above USD $100K a year.

HairTG-Cards 2 is a massive update to the previous v1 release, bringing a Painter plugin to make texturing even more intuitive and fast, and new Blender components integrating with the Blender hair system to handle UV mapping, generate hair cards from curves and handle regular or procedural hair materials.

Please check the product description or visit eyosido.com for more details.